Due to the recent drop in oil prices, there is a strong interest in the influence of the shale revolution on the global supply and demand of hydrocarbon fuels. Consequently, the attention of many economists and industry analysts is drawn to the technological, institutional and regulatory aspects...

This paper examines the determinants of FDI employment restrictions. We construct a political economy model where the TNE and the government have different objective functions: the TNE maximizes profits, and the host government cares about tax revenue and local employment. We show that the level...

This is a survey and analysis - with commentary - of migration issues and the related development policies for the sending countries. "Migration and development" is considered an unsettled and unresolved area for good reason. The policy issues are surprisingly deep and run to basic issues such...

We employ the “social conditions of innovative enterprise” framework to analyze the key determinants of China’s development path from the economic reforms of 1978 to the present. First, we focus on how government investments in human capabilities and physical infrastructure provided...

The paper opens by mapping the changes in the global auto industry in the 1990s, showing how the rapid growth in sales and production between 1990 and 1997 came largely from the emerging markets rather than the Triad regions (North America, the European Union and Japan). However, for some of...

Because of its resource and labour intensity, the wood furniture sector presents an opportunity for developing countries and their firms to participate effectively in the global economy. This paper begins with a brief description of the global wood furniture industry and highlights the...

This chapter reviews the state of the international trade literature on multinational firms. This literature addresses three main questions. First, why do some firms operate in more than one country while others do not? Second, what determines in which countries production facilities are...

The world's audit industry is concentrated in the hands of four big accounting firms: PricewaterhouseCoopers, KPMG, Ernst & Young, and Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu (the Big 4). These firms are in a strong position in that they audit the financial statements of nearly all the global public companies...

We analyse whether firms targeted by a foreign investor improve their management quality and practices after the acquisition, focusing on Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) occurring in Italy between 2010 and 2020. To proxy management quality, we resort to granular data on ISO certificates held by...

Why do firms decide to offshore certain parts of their production process? What qualifies certain countries as particularly attractive locations to offshore? In this paper we address these questions with a theory of international production hierarchies in which organizations arise endogenously...